Running a modern hospital involves balancing supply and demand, co-ordinating complex logistics, and making life-or-death medical judgments. But, for many administrators, the biggest challenge is one of the most mundane: ensuring there are enough beds for patients in the right place, at the right time.
And this is especially true in the UK, where the publicly funded national health service has faced numerous financial crises and organisational overhauls since its creation in 1948.
The UK’s new health secretary recently described the NHS as “broken” and called on health staff and the public to submit new ideas for a 10-year health plan.
More money for the service was pledged by the government in last month’s Budget. However, there is widespread acknowledgment that extra funds, alone, will not solve long-standing problems in the NHS. Technology is also required to help the NHS improve patient care and efficiency, and hit targets for patient waiting times — such as a maximum four-hour wait in an accident and emergency department.
An official review into England’s NHS, published in September, concluded that, although the health service was in a “critical condition” after years of underfunding, technology, including AI, had “enormous potential” to “transform” care and improve productivity.
29Number of NHS sites supplied with TeleTracking’s healthcare operations software
TeleTracking is among the tech companies supplying the growing UK healthcare market. Since it was founded in 1991, the privately held company has evolved from providing basic bed management to full care co-ordination for the NHS via its cloud-based software.
Today, electronic wristbands fitted to patients when they enter a hospital means they can be tracked in real time. A hospital “control room” filled with screens shows staff where there are blockages in the system. Dashboards turn red if performance targets are being missed. Hospital porters carrying mobile devices are alerted when a bed needs to be prepared for a new patient.
TeleTracking’s UK customers include Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust, Medway NHS Foundation Trust, and the Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust. All together, the company supplies 29 NHS sites. And it claims that the benefits of its technology — such as helping hospitals treat more patients by working more efficiently — can outweigh the cost of the product by two to one, within six months of installation.
“We manage the movement . . . of patients, staff and assets to make [healthcare organisations] more efficient and more productive,” says TeleTracking’s co-chief executive, Christopher Johnson.
Before the Covid pandemic, nurses at the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells Trust’s two hospitals — which serve 600,000 people in south-east England — were still using a pencil, paper and a rubber to track patients entering the hospital, often via the emergency department. The nurses would then have to try to slot patients into available beds. “[It] was massively stressful and time consuming,” recalls Miles Scott, the trust’s chief executive.
Then, in 2020, the trust began to use TeleTracking’s software. It has since helped to reduce the average emergency department wait time by one hour per patient.
Other improvements include “turnaround” time (the time between one patient leaving a bed and a new patient occupying that bed) being reduced by 1.5 hours per bed. That alone has freed up an average of 15 additional beds per day since the TeleTracking software went live, saving the trust an estimated £2.1mn per year, says Scott.
The trust also reckons that the software has helped improve its care standards. It currently ranks among the top 10 NHS Trusts in the country for monthly cancer and emergency care performance.
These and other efficiency savings mean the TeleTracking system has more than paid for itself within its first year of use, Scott points out.
As NHS organisations face continued pressure to improve efficiency while coping with the complex health needs of an ageing population, demand for technology from companies such as TeleTracking is likely to continue, experts predict.
“The [health] tech market, globally, is one that’s gone through a series of life cycles,” says Frances Cousins, a partner specialising in healthcare technology at Deloitte, an accounting and consulting firm. “Now, in the NHS, there’s a significant opportunity because [it] is driving a programme called frontline digitisation, which is implementing electronic patient records . . . and that effectively mirrors the pattern that we saw in the US about 10 to 15 years ago. So, there’s a lot of opportunity for both large suppliers . . . and smaller suppliers.”
TeleTracking, which has an annual revenue of about $100mn, says its UK market growth in the past few years has been in the double-digits.
Still, it faces plenty of competition. Other businesses specialising in the sector include: Oracle Health, part of the giant business software supplier Oracle, which bought digital healthcare supplier Cerner; Auta Health, which provides AI technology to help hospitals manage capacity; and Qventus, which says its AI assistants can make and receive phone calls and process images improve the scheduling of surgery.
A further challenge facing TeleTracking is financial. TeleTracking’s software costs roughly £100 per bed per month — meaning that, for an 800-bed hospital, it would cost about £1mn per year, according to Johnson.
To sweeten the upfront capital cost, TeleTracking promises to cover the cost of installing its software and training hospital staff in it, for the first two years of an NHS Trust contract. This offer comes with certain conditions, including a minimum contract length.
Johnson reckons there is still plenty of room for growth in the UK healthcare tech market as trusts look for new ways to improve their care and efficiency.
Artificial intelligence and “analytics” technologies will help hospitals better predict patient inflows and outflows, he says. TeleTracking plans to include AI in its platform by early next year, to help hospitals predict patient demand and plan care in real time.
“We create unique data . . . [relating] to the operations and flow of patients to a hospital and so that unique data is the fuel for generative AI [and] predictive solutions,” says Johnson.
Predictions and planning can help to reduce delays when patients leave hospital, too. Many can be ready to be discharged but have to wait for their prescriptions, Johnson notes. But such bottlenecks could be further eased by an Amazon-style home delivery of prescriptions, subject to strict regulation.
In the case of the NHS, budget constraints may act a spur to fresh thinking, technical advances and improved care, Johnson suggests. “We have a saying at TeleTracking: ‘Too much money has created many of the problems; and too little money is what’s going to solve them’ — because it forces you to be more efficient.”
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